On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Howard Lowndes wrote: > On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Francois Haasbroek wrote: > > > > > Every LUG that I visit has some stuff on using an old 486 as firewall. > > Some claim that you can do it without a hard drive even. So I thought > > a 350 MB disk with 32 MB Ram should do the job. I have to host 2 files > > I think this concept is becoming a myth unless you want a REALLY > minimalist gateway box with almost bugger all firewalling and a POTS > modem, and are prepared to gut the kernel extensively. I do know that > 486s won't drive ISDN cards reliably (been there, done that) and if you do > any extensive firewalling or proxying then its also a no-brainer.
I dunno Howard, you can get a heck of a lot in 350Mb if you throw away all the GUI stuff. For instance the whole of E-Smith 4.1 only took 160Mb and that's a complete workgroup server with FTP, Web, Email, Proxy, DNS, Samba, Browser based config and quite a decent Firewall setup (even though they claim it wasn't a firewall). Even a RedHat 7.2 with a few minutes time going through the custom config will yield you a system that would probably fit on the 350Mb disk, probably far less space occupied for Debian & Slackware systems. As for the RAM 32Mb is probably the minimum these days for the installer but you can tune it down to 16Mb afterwards. Then, if you saw Anthony's talk on thin client terminals you'd also see a heck of a lot in a 16Mb flash disk - X, Netscape to name a couple of large programs. -- ---<GRiP>--- Web: www.arcadia.au.com/gripz Answering Machine/fax: 02 4950 1194 (wait 5 mins if no answer) Mobile: 0408 686 201 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
